Sunday, March 25, 2018

Technology is good, Technology is disruptive

I was
reading an article about a strike going on near the Pakistan-Afghan border for
the last four days because new technology has been introduced to easily
facilitate the customs procedures by involving computers. This would seem very
efficient from one’s standpoint but the old system had involved various steps
and with each step somebody livelihood was involved and now they felt
threatened and were striking to abolish this introduction of computers which
they felt had eliminated their need for so many steps and now all those steps
were replaced by one of two people. If I was one of them, I would also feel
threatened since I would not know what I would do when my skill set which would
have become obsolete by the new technology introduced to reduce costs and time,
which makes me, come to this post. I also wrote in my blog a few weeks ago
regarding how the online hailing websites has supposedly forced one of the taxi
drivers to commit suicide blaming it on the new technology being embraced by
the city of New York.

Technology
is good as long as it enhances the standard of living and it has done wonders
for the many people around the globe but the darker part which people did not
realize (I don’t understand how would they not) that it has disrupted the lives
of people who were trained to do things a certain kind of way. For example see
how one of the biggest online retailers is experimenting with grocery stores
with no checkout counters and no employees where people will only use their app
to scan their products and also add to their account and just stroll out of the
stores without interaction with any employee and instead of employing maybe
several people to man their cash counters, they would have only a few employees
to restock their stores. I have seen and used these electronic counters in
stores where you scan your items barcodes and they will show the price and then
you scan your loyalty card and your credit card and you are done without
getting any face to face interaction with stores cashiers. Another one is how
driverless cars are being experimented with so that there will be no drivers
behind the wheel (scarier than in other cases as lives are at stake). Robots
are increasingly taking over some of the work that humans used to do in advance
countries as the ageing population is being gradually replaced by robots
wherever the companies can. Although technology has definitely made life easier
for people but it has and will cause substantial unemployment among less
educated people and the resultant resentment will not be good for the economies
which are increasingly relying on technology to increase their productivity and
gain competitive advantage against their rivals.